My work applies a folkloric and historicist lens to medieval and early modern British literature and forward into popular culture.
My interests are in how the narratives of the folk are both read in and repressed by mainstream accounts.

Mascot for #DevilDiss

Mascot for #DevilDiss

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Initial Thoughts on Daredevil, A Trip Down Memory Lane, and Thoughts on How You Can't Go Home Again

When I first moved to NYC in 2000 I made a beeline for a bar called the Kevin St. James in Hell's Kitchen at 46th and 8th.

Source: http://nyrocks.blogspot.com/2005/06/ksj-in-hells-kitchen.html

No, I wasn't an alcoholic. A friend of mine has been on vacation in the city mainly to see Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh. She had stood outside to get his autograph and when he got in a cab, pulled a movie move and followed him. She lost him (sort of) in Hell's Kitchen, but walked into a bar and asked if he had just been in there. The bartender said yes, and they sat and talked for a while. So when I moved to NYC my friend told me to check out the bar.
I lived in Brooklyn (Grand Army Plaza) back then so it was a couple of weeks before I got into the city. I walked in, the bartender with a great smile asked me what brought me in because it was during the day and I told him the story. His response?
Oh, Sarah? With the curly hair?
I had just met Kevin, the owner (he always said James his partner got the St. in front of his name because he was the money man).
And I had just found my neighborhood bar.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/64976602@N00/194323221/

I always spend more time with the staff than the customers, so it's perhaps no surprise that I became friends with Kevin, and George (above on the right) his manager. Later there was Peter the Irish bartender. In 2000/2001 it was reflective of the larger changes in the neighborhood, more upscale on some nights, more suits than you'd expect to see in Hell's Kitchen, but the largest population at the Kevin St. James was always the people of Hell's Kitchen itself, the firefighters, the still mostly Irish population. Kevin's dad had been a bartender in the neighborhood, and this bar was his dream. He was a strong supporter of the firefighters, way before it was trendy and patriotic to do so.
I left NYC in 2004, and was sad to hear that the Kevin St. James had closed. I have no pictures of my time there, it was before cataloging your life online in pictures was de rigeur. But I was able to find images online that captured some of the magic. There's a mention of the bar in a book, Past Redemption by Savannah Russe. David Arquette filmed a photo shoot there just before it closed.Memories of the bar float around here and there.
Apparently the whole block was bought out and turned into condos for rich folks. News reports Kevin has moved to a new bar, and that makes me happy. But I mourn the passing of the Kevin St. James because it was so representative of a neighborhood and a time period.

Daredevil perhaps more than other comics is innately tied to not just place, but time. Over the weekend, as people watched- some binging, some rationing themselves, some questions about place came up. I had one such conversation with Kevin L. Ferguson‏@KevinLFerguson. The conversation started with a discussion of the stereotypical villains- Chinese drug lords, Russian mafia, Japanese Yakuza. And I wondered if this was a gesture to how delineated the neighborhoods of NYC are or were due to ethnicity.

For New Yorkers, past and present, there are always critiques of movies or television shows set in NYC. Kevin and I both confessed confusion over the opening scene at the docks, as the waterfront is not typically associated with Hell's Kitchen. We both marked the shooting location as probably Silver Studios due to the exterior shots and what was in the background. And we talked about how it didn't really look like Hell's Kitchen. Or any NYC neighborhood.
And I think the reason is Hell's Kitchen isn't Hell's Kitchen anymore.
In the narrative of the show this is explained away as part of the aftermath of the destruction from The Avengers when a good chunk of NYC is destroyed in the invasion/showdown. In fact this rebuilding is key to the main plot and Fisk's motivation and actions. As Kevin pointed out, it's hard not to read this through a post-9/11 when there is still rebuilding and remaking fourteen years later.

But here's the problem- as much as I'm loving Daredevil, and rationing a couple of episodes a night to stretch out the love, watching the show got me thinking, about the Kevin St. James, and Hell's Kitchen, and whether or not you could go home again. Or rather, whether you could still tell a story about Hell's Kitchen if Hell's Kitchen didn't exist anymore.Daredevil first appeared in 1964. Hell's Kitchen was different then, known as much for its Irish, working class population as for the violence gracing its streets. Its location was part of this, this is pre-1990sTimes Square cleanup. Hookers still graced streets, as did more of a criminal element.I'm not the first person to comment that the Hell's Kitchen in the show is not the Hell's Kitchen of today.
But this is my question- can Daredevil still be Daredevil if the neighborhood that anchors and defines the character, doesn't exist anymore. It's not the post-Avengers rebuild that makes this difficult, as post-9/11 even now makes that easy (unfortunately) to still read in any NYC set piece. Rather it's the fact that the long term residents of Hell's Kitchen, the Irish, the Puerto Ricans, the working class people have been priced out of their generational homes. Ms. Cardenas being pushed out of her home by first Tully then Fisk is reflective of what has happened the last decade. The people that once made and defined that neighborhood are no longer there. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford to anymore.
A similar thing has happened in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and some neighborhoods in Queens as rich, entitled people have spread out from Manhattan and displaced generations of residents.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving Daredevil, and Charlie Cox as Matt Murdoch. And I'm looking forward to finishing the series (although I already know they can't make season two fast enough for me!).
But I wonder how the series will end, or work long term with these issues of erasure. The series so far seems critical of people, represented by Fisk, that would remove the older generation. But the paradox is the series is set in the current time, so these people were removed a long time ago. Does the show illustrate nostalgia for an older time? Does it reframe it to comment on post 9/11? Or is it just ignoring this situation and overlaying the Daredevil narrative over the now, without considering these larger issues?

All I know is that the show is great, I miss the Kevin, and as much as I wish you could, you can't go home again.

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About Me

I am a PhD candidate in British and Irish Literary Studies
at the University of New Mexico. My research focuses on how folkloric
characters are represented in literature and popular culture,
specifically the devil.

I regularly write reviews and articles for Sequart Organization. My most recent scholarly work analyzes the function of the folkloric forest in Twin Peaks for an In Focus section of Cinema Journal (2016), the functional aesthetic of the Nightmare on Elm Street films in Style and Formin the Hollywood SlasherFilm (2015), and the creation of Elfego Baca as a folk hero in "Don't Just Print the Legend, Write It: The Odd Construction of Elf ego Baca as Folk Hero" for Western Folklore (2015).

Dissertation Project

The popular understanding of the devil is of a visually different Other who deceives, tempts, and seduces good men and women away from God’s divine authority. He is often portrayed as an adversary and individuals or groups associated with him, such as Jews, Moors, and unruly women, are marginalized and marked as a threat. Yet a longue duree analysis of the English devil from the Anglo-Normans to the Restoration reveals an innately political devil who threatens power structures and defines English nationalism through negation. William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum describes devilish leaders as the greatest threats to England’s stability, who must be defeated by great leaders. Þe Deulis Parlement constructs the democratic collective of Parliament and free speech as demonic. Both I Henry IV and Macbeth demonstrate the dangers of devilish leaders who rebel, challenging the divine authority of the monarchy. Each of these elements; devilish leaders, demonic parliament, and diabolic rebellion are presentand revised in Paradise Lost where Satan is the vehicle for this concerns about English nationalism after the Restoration.